Since then, there have been hoaxes at UVA, SUNY New Paltz, Williams College, the University of Tennessee, and at a Colorado high school—see here, here, here, here, here, and here.

You don’t have to take my word for the existence of the Hoax Crime phenomenon. Inside Higher Education’s Allie Grasgreen (email her) subsequently agonized over it in an article this last summer. You can get some sense of her, and Higher Ed’s, Orwellian mindset from her reportorial comment:

But one should not discount these incidents, even if they are set up, some officials say. Regardless of whether a hate crime actually occurred, the fact that a student would feel compelled to fake one points to a whole other set of problems beyond just crisis response.

“As an administrator, those are the kinds of things I’m really sensitive to – what are the students saying – because even if it’s not true, the perception is their reality,” said William L. Howard, assistant vice president of academic services at St. Mary’s College of Maryland

Nevertheless, none of the MSM stories I’ve read about the UT “Hate Crimes” mentioned this history of campus hate crime hoaxes, or the imminent Supreme Court hearing.

I guess those facts didn’t fit the script.

The first clue that the UT bleach balloons are a hoax:

“Didn’t have any particular names, didn’t have any particular locations, didn’t have any times.”

That’s University of Texas/Austin Police Chief Robert Dahlstrom, to KVUE News, in a section lasting but a few seconds sandwiched between segments promoting the hate crime narrative, in a 2:19 story by “Reporter” Melissa Mahadeo (Email her)

I have a favorite pair of black Levis that I rarely wear because of white bleach burns. When we went to Trinidad the summer after my father-in-law’s death, his uninhabited house was filthy, so I bought bleach by the gallon for cleaning, Trini-style. I poured about a pint of pure bleach into the 6’x 8’ shower. Then I poured a huge barrel of water into the shower, and the bleach splashed up, on to my pants legs. Had the bleach originally hit the floor from 10-20 feet above, my entire upper body would have been burned, and I could have permanently lost my eyesight.

Any legitimate news story on Hate Crime attacks with bleach-filled balloons would present:

4. Police reports of the attacks (hospital personnel would have been obligated to notify law enforcement, even if the victims had not gone to police);

5. Bits of balloons with bleach residue that police investigations of the “crime scenes” would have turned up; and

6. Victim and/or witness reports of perpetrators who were of a different race than the victims, shouting racial epithets at them, etc.

Instead, there is—nothing.

The third clue: Cute KVUE “Reporter” Mahadeo opened her October 2, 2012.story by interviewing cute black student Nia Wesley. Mahadeo closed with some advocacy that has me very suspicious about her own role in this bit of theater (no hate crime hoax can survive without aggressive media collaboration):

So, when [Wesley’s] friends told her they’d been hit with balloons, possibly filled with bleach, thrown at them from balconies, she was appalled.

“It seems they’re trying to whitewash, because the only students that have reported it have been black or Mexican.”

Wait a second. Wesley isn’t claiming to have been a victim, just to be speaking on behalf of the mysterious “victims.” She is insinuating suggesting that “they” [UT Administrators?!!] routinely ignore hate crime charges by “black or Mexican” students. Allegedly, several other friends of hers also suffered such attacks, but did not report them to the police.

This is amazing. All over the UT campus, “black, Mexican”—and Asian, according to some stories!—students are being attacked, and the police knew nothing about the attacks, but Wesley knew every single victim. What are the odds of that?

The odds actually improve when we learn that two of the reports, including the alleged attack back in June, emanated from the same black activist, Jaysen Runnels claimed to have “been victimized twice by bleach bombs on two separate occasions, both in West Campus.

Activist-“victim” Jaysen Runnels would be the one speaking into the megaphone

Wesley says in the October 2 report that her father told her that he had experienced the same thing, back in 1986 as a student on the same campus.

If that is so, I’d like to see the man on TV, showing his scars, and the 1986 news and police reports about the horrific, racially motivated bleach attacks on him and other black UT students.

No, I won’t take his word for anything—anymore than I take his daughter’s word.

The likelihood of confirmation of these alleged 1986 attacks is about nil. Parallel lies are an integral technique in Hate Crime Hoaxes, whether Tawana Brawley, or the Duke Rape Hoax. The hoaxers lie about the past, lie about the present, and then say “See! It’s happening all over again!”

In WVUE “reporter” Melissa Mahadeo’s October 3 segment, the camera focuses on a Texas state flag draped on a third-floor balcony.

Is WVUE suggesting that the Texas state flag is a symbol of hate, and that those who fly it are committing hate crimes against “black or Mexican” and Asian students?

Mahadeo claimed:

Wesley said her friends did not initially come forward because they were afraid to speak out, but now that they have, they are going to be honest.

Gimme a break. Afraid of what? A black or Hispanic charging whites with Hate Crimes today gets automatic, national celebrity/victim/hero status. Don’t Wesley and her friends know that the first law of lying is plausibility?

Mahadeo gave away that she is aware of the weakness of her story by trying to shore it up:

Wesley and several other students told me of racially themed parties happening on campus. They are speaking out against the parties, and against these alleged balloon attacks right now at a rally through West Campus.”

What is “racially themed parties” supposed to mean? Hasn’t Melissa Mahadeo ever heard of the First Amendment? UT is a public institution. It is unconstitutional for it to infringe on students’ freedom of opinion or association (oops!). Besides which, non-white students get together for all sorts of “racially themed” activities without Nia Wesley or Melissa Mahadeo trying to get them expelled and/or arrested.

[Inaccuracy alert: The London Daily Mail (!) added this picture to its rewrite of Mahadeo’s reportorial with the caption: Poor taste: The Tri Delta and Zeta Tau Alpha fraternities faced backlash after hosting a Mexican-themed party where two guests wore shirts bearing the words `Illegal` and `Border Patrol`.]

This is what Nia Wesley and Melissa Mahadeo are talking about: In their book, if you mock illegal alien invaders, you’re guilty of a “Hate Crime.” Something tells me that doubting their Hate Crime story also counts as a “Hate Crime.”

“[to a newsroom colleague] Now, Tyler, if you are found throwing these balloons, whether or not they’re filled with bleach, if they are thrown at a student, that is considered assault, whether or not it hits that student.”

This notion that the police should be rounding up college students for dropping water balloons on other students is a desperate stretch. Mahadeo has to know that such charges could represent the most piddling level of misdemeanor assault.

In my student days, criminally charging someone for such a prank would have been unthinkable. The only circumstance I can imagine, in which campus or city police in Austin would charge someone would be if they found a handy, white heterosexual male “assailant”—preferably one with the wrong, or should I say “right,” politics.

Nicholas Stix [email him] is a New York City-based journalist and researcher, much of whose work focuses on the nexus of race, crime, and education. He spent much of the 1990s teaching college in New York and New Jersey. His work has appeared in Chronicles, The New York Post, Weekly Standard, Daily News, New York Newsday, American Renaissance, Academic Questions, Ideas on Liberty and many other publications. Stix was the project director and principal author of the NPI report, The State of White America-2007. He blogs at Nicholas Stix, Uncensored.